What to make of the informal group just set up by Germany and France, with invitations to Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Spain, to fast-track the European Union’s painfully slow, calcified, convoluted decision-making processes?

Given the world we currently inhabit, it sounds like a more than reasonable idea. If nothing else, this so-called E6 sub-group has economic clout on its side: members are the EU’s six largest economies, accounting for almost three-quarters of the bloc’s economic output.

I read that E6 finance and economy ministers had an inaugural video call in recent days. Sounds like they want to push ahead to develop an action plan quickly. Easier said than done, though, regardless of their economic clout. Forming a breakaway from the full complement of 27 EU countries and creating what has been dubbed a two-speed Europe – or should that be a two-class Europe? – comes with political fragmentation risk even if the intent is the opposite and is bang on the money at a time of multiple geopolitical stresses.

Because in case anyone’s missed it, we’ve entered a new geopolitical paradigm. Added to longer-standing geopolitical stresses emanating from China and Russia, and economic power stresses emanating from Asia, Europe has a suite of new stresses created by aggressive and ( to some ) unhinged actions from the current White House administration.

In aggregate, these stresses have brought to the fore Europe’s alarmingly weak defence capabilities, threatened its energy and food security, undermined its supply-chain integrity and endangered its regional sovereignty and its place in the new world order. Not a good place to be.

With a classic pre-emptive comment about what everyone was obviously thinking about the formation of E6, Germany’s finance minister Lars Klingbeil was reported as saying that the underlying idea is “not to break up the EU but to allow ‘coalitions of the willing’ to advance specific projects faster, while leaving the door open for other countries to join later”. Coalitions of the willing? I’ll let that one hang …

Sounds very much like they want to plough ahead and force decisions on the others rather than have everyone eternally suffer the interminable delays caused by the horse-trading necessary to get around the single-country veto that a lot of EU decision-making rests on. In the current circumstances, that much at least makes sense.

Here we go again

Now I’m no political scientist or EU-ologist and I generally steer away from political topics, so why am I even writing about this? Because alongside co-ordinating defence spending, securing access to raw materials and strengthening the role of the euro, a core E6 agenda item is to progress … I even hesitate to mention it … capital markets union, or savings and investments union or whatever it’s called this week.

I mentioned horse-trading above. When it comes to capital markets and keeping the equine metaphor alive, how many times can you flog a dead horse?

The conceptual precepts of capital markets union have never been in doubt, ever since the very first reference to it by Jean-Claude Juncker ( then a candidate for the presidency of the European Commission ) to the European Parliament on July 15 2014, and the Building a Capital Markets Union Commission Green Paper in February 2015.

A good idea can be a good idea on paper for eternity. But over the past decade-plus, what sustained, material progress has there been in progressing capital markets union? I don’t mean in terms of political and technocratic efforts to unify regulation or reduce market fragmentation ( best not mention the unfinished business of aligning tax and insolvency regimes across the EU27 ).

I mean progress in actually creating a single capital market across the bloc that has actually created financing opportunities or better financing opportunities for start-ups and small and medium-sized companies, that has actually created a deep pool of bloc-wide risk capital to fund innovation and has actually been utilised in real-world funding and growth situations?

Give me a postage stamp and I’ll write the answers on the back.

I’ve been harshly critical of the project over the years as something unattainable in the face of public political support but deep private domestic political hostility and resentment; and unachievable and actually unnecessary given the home-bias realities of country-aligned institutional and retail capital.

It takes a crisis

But they say it takes a crisis to make things happen. And boy is Europe in a crisis. Europe’s banking and financial markets now need to do the heavy lifting to mobilise and allocate the requisite amounts of regional private and public funding to get itself out of the mess it’s in. Near the top of the agenda – and items that have only relatively recently become urgent – is reducing dependencies on US and China-built AI, US financial institutions ( banks, payment companies, fintechs ), US Big Tech, US financial markets and the US dollar.

Creating an EU risk-free asset has long been on the agenda, but it has recently become a critically important element of achieving financial and economy security since the new US administration took office a little over a year ago and started redrawing the map. A euro risk-free asset looks far from seeing the light of day, but it’s this that’ll drive a greater global role for the euro.

Six isn’t 27, but it’s still six

So does a breakaway E6 stand a better chance of making progress? Six countries are fewer than 27 but it’s still six. Case in point: Poland – the only E6 member from Eastern Europe, a country that has a heavily bank-intermediated financial system and has in the past been very cautious about seeing regulatory and supervisory power over financial markets transfer to Brussels – has pushed back on tax and insolvency harmonisation efforts and equity market integration. The current pro-EU administration may have softened the language but not necessarily the stance.

The other E6 countries have hardly been constantly in agreement over the years in key policy areas. If they don’t align quickly, the project will collapse before it starts.

So, to the multi-trillion-euro question: has the current geopolitical crisis sufficiently alarmed Europe’s leaders to change the status quo such that they take concrete steps to get over Donald Trump’s mocking of the region’s inability to make decisions quickly or at all? A criticism that stings because it’s true.

Despite the trials and tribulations of the past decade and the lack of progress towards capital markets union, the EU now has the best opportunity to push ahead with long-standing goals and break the inertia created by its convoluted decision-making.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.